In the fall of 1977, I was a 17-year-old freshman at Western Kentucky University, eager to become a journalist but not entirely sure how to go about it. I was on my own for the first time, away from a tiny town that made Bowling Green seem like a big city. Before I left home, the editor of my hometown weekly told me I had to get to know Jim Ausenbaugh, the former state editor of The Courier-Journal and a legend in Kentucky journalism circles who had, a year earlier, joined the journalism faculty at Western. He told me about how Ausenbaugh directed coverage of the state legislature, of coal-mining disasters, of major investigative projects, of the stories of average Kentuckians from Pikeville to Paducah. So when I saw Aus walk into the College Heights Herald newsroom one morning early that fall, I set aside my innate shyness, walked over and stuck out my hand. I had no idea how much making this acquaintance would affect my life – then, and through all the decades since.

James Driscoll Ausenbaugh died yesterday, less than a month before his 91st birthday. He was, in all the best ways, a hell of a man. Back in the day, he could drink just about anybody under the table (except when he couldn’t). He could curse in the most imaginative ways and recite full passages from the Bible (the King James Version – not for ecclesiastical reasons, but for the poetry of its language). He was a natural editor and a natural teacher, and what he taught me about journalism still guides my work today.

One day in 1978, Aus walked into his basic editing class carrying that morning’s Courier-Journal. Without explanation, he began reading aloud a front-page story by one of his favorite former reporters, the great Livingston Taylor. The story exposed a scheme in which state officials were making short-term deposits into a bank owned by a friend of the governor’s. The bank made a lot of money – and the state lost a lot of money, because it could have had a higher interest rate elsewhere.

“It’s stealing!” Aus roared when he finished reading. No different, he said, from robbing a liquor store at gunpoint – except that the money by God came out of the pockets of every single taxpaying Kentuckian and no one would ever have known about it if not for Liv Taylor and The Courier-Journal.

I have no idea what else we discussed in class that day. But the real lesson – that our work as journalists is often the only way to hold public officials accountable to the people they’re supposed to serve – stuck with me forever.

On the first day of another course, feature writing, Aus set the mood by reading aloud from the work of several of his favorite newspaper writers: David Hawpe’s evocative remembrance of a coal-mining disaster, for instance, and Dave Kindred’s elegant profile of Muhammad Ali. When Aus finished the Kindred piece, he quietly placed the clip on the table. “Now that,” he said finally, is “a writin’ man.”

A writin’ man. From that moment on, that’s what I aspired to be.

Throughout my rather undistinguished academic career, Aus and I often sat in his office, in the basement of Downing University Center, and talked about writing, about sports, about the old days at The Courier-Journal, about his brief tenure in Germany with Stars and Stripes, about my career plans, about life. I worked as a paper grader for Aus and Bob Adams for a couple of semesters, and the afternoons I spent in their office gave me as much an education as any class did.

Teaching brought great joy to Aus, and I don’t recall him ever being prouder than when he was named professor of the year at Western. He didn’t have a PhD, or a master’s, but he could out-teach any of the lifelong academics on campus.

Writing became another delight. Aus always felt more confident in his ability to help writers fix stories than he did in perfecting his own. But in the late 1980s, he decided to find out if he could write in a way that met his standards for others. I was honored when he asked me to be his editor – first for a book of short stories, mostly set in and around some version of his native Dawson Springs, Kentucky, and then for a memoir of his years at The Courier-Journal. Both were lively and eloquent, well-crafted and insightful.

He was, without a doubt, a writin’ man.

More than anything else, though, he was a friend. He cared deeply about his students – while they were in school, and for decades after. He harbored me in his house on Barren River Lake during more personal crises than I can count. He shared his love of opera and University of Kentucky basketball, he tolerated my terrible pool playing, he astounded me with his ability to recall the seat of each of Kentucky’s 120 counties, and he gently nudged me toward solving whatever problem I was facing.

In December 1982, when I finally left Western (I wouldn’t get my degree until years later), Aus gave me a gift: an American Heritage Dictionary, his favorite. It wasn’t until several days later that I noticed the inscription inside the front cover. “To Alan Judd,” he had written, “the son I never had.”

I treasure that dictionary, and I treasure every minute I got to spend with the man who gave it to me.

But Jonathan’s mother is scheduled to appear in court Monday to answer charges related to his disappearance. A grand jury recently accused Kayla Ann Aubart, 32, of cruelty to children and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, charges that could send her to prison for five to 20 years.

By Alan Judd

Dr. Kris Sperry took the witness stand, exuding the full authority and credibility of the state of Georgia.

Without hesitation, the chief medical examiner testified that Henry Glover died from a bullet to the back, fired by a high-powered rifle. “Any competent forensic pathologist,” Sperry said, would see the evidence the same way.

But Sperry hadn’t examined Glover’s body. He hadn’t studied the bullet, because none was found. And his opinion, like a surprising number of others he presents in court, was far from unanimous.

Sperry wasn’t even testifying in Georgia. On Aug. 29, 2013, he was in New Orleans, appearing as an expert witness against a former police officer accused of murder after Hurricane Katrina. For stating his opinion that day, Sperry earned a fee of $5,000.

It was one of more than 500 cases since 2003 in which Sperry acted as a paid forensic consultant — all while employed full time by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Sperry’s role as expert-for-hire doubles his $184,000 state salary and often takes him out of the medical examiner’s office at GBI headquarters. It also exposes him to conflicts of interest and, at times, undermines his medical and scientific judgment, an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found.

The newspaper examined court filings, depositions and trial transcripts from more than five dozen cases. Time after time, lawyers and other adversaries accuse Sperry of tailoring conclusions to suit his paying customers.

“He’s a hired gun,” said Rick Simmons, the defense attorney in the New Orleans case.

“It’s about money,” said George McGriff, another lawyer who challenged Sperry.

Sperry, 60, the chief medical examiner since 1997, oversees investigations into thousands of deaths each year: homicides and suicides, as well as those from accidents or natural causes. An opinion from Sperry or one of his 13 deputies can have profound consequences. Whether a killer faces charges or whether an insurance company pays a deceased person’s beneficiaries may hinge on the medical examiners’ conclusions.

Sperry, though, gives the impression of a detached, somewhat eccentric scientist lost in his work. He indulges an academic fascination with tattoos and sports facial hair invariably described as walrus-like. And yet he is so aware of his status as an expert witness that he can immediately cite how many times he has testified in court (704 on Oct. 31 last year, for instance).

Sperry is “a doctor of national reputation and accomplishment,” said his boss, GBI Director Vernon Keenan. “He operates on an extremely high plane of expertise.”

Sperry declined to be interviewed.

In a memo to Keenan about the Journal-Constitution’s inquiry, Sperry said he remembers few details about his work outside the GBI. When those cases conclude, he told Keenan, he shreds his files.

Keenan dismissed criticism of Sperry as “the back and forth of professionals.”

But in the New Orleans case, for one, four other pathologists attacked Sperry’s conclusions as relying on supposition, not sound forensics. One called his theories on Glover’s death “junk science.”

“Are there people who go out and stretch the truth for the benefit of their private business? Yes,” said Dr. Vincent DiMaio, the longtime medical examiner in San Antonio, Texas, and the author of several influential forensic-science books, who criticized Sperry’s work in New Orleans. “Usually, these are not people who are employed as medical examiners.”

‘A lot of cases’

For reviewing documents and writing reports, Sperry bills his clients $500 an hour. Depositions run at least $1,500. For courtroom testimony, he charges $7,500 a day, (up from $5,000 two years ago), plus travel expenses.

No professional organization or government agency regulates such rates. But interviews with other pathologists suggest Sperry’s fees — like his caseload — rank among the highest in the country.

“Some people make a lot of money because they’re good,” said Dr. Steven Karch, a pathologist in Oakland, California, and a frequent expert witness. “Some make a lot of money because they hustle and do a lot of cases.”

Either way, Sperry’s private caseload rivals that from his state job.

Dr. Kris Sperry testifies in a criminal trial in 2015. (Photo by Chattanooga Times Free Press.)

He appeared in court 13 times as the state medical examiner between 2010 and 2014 — and 42 times as a private expert. He performed 208 full autopsies for the medical examiner’s office while accepting 158 outside cases for review.

Sperry is like any other hourly worker in state government, Keenan said: he puts in 40 hours each week, “either actually at work or in a combination of work and leave.”

“After that,” Keenan said, “it’s his free time.”

At times, however, Sperry conducts private business on the public’s time.

The Journal-Constitution examined Sperry’s weekly time sheets for the past five years. On 67 days, Sperry reported working at least eight hours for the state when, according to other documents, he spent time out of the office giving depositions or testifying in court for private clients.

On 13 of those days, Sperry recorded a full day at the GBI but actually was in court out of state.

For example, Sperry testified as an expert witness in Charleston, West Virginia, on Jan. 10, 2013. But his time sheet showed nine hours at his state job: 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., with 30 minutes off for lunch.

A GBI review prompted by the Journal-Constitution’s inquiry found numerous inaccuracies in Sperry’s time sheets, Keenan said last week. The agency docked Sperry 226 1/2 hours — about 5 1/2 weeks — of vacation time and other accumulated leave to make up for the discrepancies.

Sperry signed the time sheets beneath a warning that false statements violate the law. The penalty is one to five years in prison.

Keenan said Sperry often filled out the forms late and from memory. “I have no doubt this was a result of sloppy record keeping.”

‘Conflict of interest’

In each deposition and at every trial, one question stands out: Is Sperry an impartial medical examiner, or a paid courtroom advocate?

One case involved Elsie Goedhals, 40, who died shortly after a 14-hour flight from South Africa to Atlanta. Dr. Keith Lehman determined she died of natural causes: a pulmonary embolism resulting from deep vein thrombosis in her leg.

Goedhals’ insurance policy paid only if she died in an accident. Her family sued the insurer, claiming the embolism occurred accidentally because of the long flight. Refuting Lehman’s opinion was critical. So Goedhals’ family hired Lehman’s boss — Sperry — as their expert witness.

Sperry testified that determining the manner of death is “terribly imperfect” and “an opinion situation.”

“It really does depend on the definition of accident,” he said.

A lawyer for the insurance company asked Sperry how often he gets paid to re-evaluate cases that originated in his office.

“It’s very, very rare,” he said.

“Would you consider that a conflict of interest?” the lawyer asked.

“Not unless I was in disagreement with, say, for instance, Dr. Lehman,” Sperry said. “I think he and I are in complete agreement with this.”

In truth, they did not agree.

Asked whether the death could have been accidental, Lehman testified: “I wouldn’t consider it such, based on the criteria we use.”

Sperry told Keenan he recalls nothing about the case.

Credibility

In February 2005, Sperry completed a report on the death of a jail prisoner in Ocala, Florida. Thomas Duncan, 37, got into a fight with jail officers, who covered his head with a mesh device called a “spit mask” and strapped him into a chair. A doctor said Duncan died after a lack of oxygen caused irreversible brain damage.

Sperry placed no blame on the jail officers. He said Duncan suffered a heart attack because he was “struggling violently and actively resisting.”

Five months later, Sperry finished another report on the death of another prisoner, this one in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Mary Giannetti, 39, got into a fight with jail officers, who restrained her face down on the floor until she stopped breathing.

Sperry’s conclusion: Giannetti’s death was a homicide, caused by “inappropriate restraint procedures.”

In Florida, Sperry was an expert witness for the county sheriff; in Oklahoma, for the dead woman’s family.

As a paid expert, Wecht said, “I’m not bound” to favor a client’s position. “You’ve got to be honest to maintain your credibility.”

An Ohio case in 2013 stretched the limits of Sperry’s credibility.

He was an expert witness for a physician fighting the suspension of his medical license. The doctor had said an elderly patient’s vision was good enough to retain his pilot’s license; in reality, the man was legally blind. A few months later, during a charity event, the man was giving rides in his airplane when, without warning, it crashed. The man died, as did all five passengers.

The National Transportation Safety Board could not determine what caused the crash, but cited a contributing factor: the doctor’s “failure to accurately assess and report the pilot’s visual deficiency.”

Sperry presented an alternate version.

A bad heart, not bad vision, incapacitated the pilot, Sperry testified. The plane crashed, he said, because the passengers couldn’t fly it when the pilot lost consciousness.

Sperry’s opinion drew harsh criticism from a hearing officer for Ohio’s state medical board. He wrote that Sperry had no training in accident reconstruction, did not examine the aircraft, and had no idea what happened in the cockpit. He said he “did not find Dr. Sperry’s testimony credible and, therefore, placed little to no weight on his testimony.”

Sperry’s memo to Keenan said his opinion “had no relationship” to the hearing officer’s decision to uphold the doctor’s suspension.

The same was true, he said, in the New Orleans murder case.

‘Junk science’

What was left of Henry Glover arrived at the morgue in five red biohazard bags.

Glover, 31, had been burned far beyond recognition in the back seat of a white Chevrolet beside the Mississippi River in New Orleans, straight across from the French Quarter. It was Sept. 2, 2005, four days after Hurricane Katrina struck and the levees broke.

The red bags contained a skull, some body tissue, and a lot of debris.

“Most of it,” said Dr. Dana Troxclair, a medical examiner in New Orleans, “was just charred pieces of bone.”

X-rays revealed what looked like metal embedded in the tissue — bullet fragments, Troxclair guessed. For two hours, she and her supervisor sifted through the remains, but everything crumbled in their fingertips.

A bullet, Troxclair said, would not have deteriorated that much, even in the intense heat of the car fire.

“We came to the conclusion that it was pieces of the car,” she testified. “It could be anything. But we were sure it wasn’t a piece of a projectile.”

Federal prosecutors accused a New Orleans police officer, David Warren, of killing Glover. Convicted in 2010, Warren received a 25-year prison sentence.

An appeals court ordered a new trial, however, and prosecutors called in Sperry to bolster their most damaging assertion: that Warren, armed with a rifle on a second-story balcony like a sniper in a war zone, shot Glover without cause.

Eight years to the day after Katrina hit, Sperry took the witness stand.

As in other cases, Sperry began by reciting his professional experience. As Georgia’s first chief medical examiner, he said, he oversees “all of the homicides and decomposed bodies” and other complicated cases. He claimed particular familiarity with wounds from high-powered rifles because those weapons kill people so often in rural Georgia.

Sperry testified that he reviewed X-rays from the autopsy and four photographs taken before the car was set afire. One picture showed Glover’s body face down in the back seat of the white Chevrolet, with an apparent blood stain on his white T-shirt between his shoulder blades. A larger stain seems to have saturated the right side of the shirt.

Henry Glover’s body was photographed in the back seat of a car before the vehicle was set on fire in New Orleans. (Photo provided by U.S. Justice Department.)

The picture, Sperry said, showed that a bullet passed through Glover’s body, back to front — even though his front was not visible.

“At a minimum,” Sperry said, the bullet cut through Glover’s heart, his left lung, and his aorta and other major arteries.

The X-rays, Sperry said, displayed a snowstorm effect of innumerable bullet fragments, appearing white in the reversed image. The “snowstorm,” he testified, “should tell any competent forensic pathologist without any other information that they’re dealing with a high-velocity rifle wound. It’s unique and specific.”

The prosecutor asked whether Glover’s body could have absorbed metal from the car during the fire.

“That concept is preposterous,” Sperry said. “That does not exist in medical science. I mean, in a very simple way, an analogy is if … you order a steak, a pepper-covered steak at a restaurant, the pepper is not down inside the steak. It’s on the outside because that’s where it stays. It doesn’t penetrate. And, the human body, human tissues do not melt and re-form and surround stuff. That’s preposterous.”

Other experts were incredulous over Sperry’s conclusions.

“You can’t make a diagnosis of high-velocity gunshot wound … just on the basis of an X-ray,” Dr. Jerry Spencer, the former chief medical examiner for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, testified.

Karch, the Oakland pathologist, agreed. “Any attempt to do so,” he wrote in a statement to the court, “is little more than junk science.”

Perhaps the most damning repudiation came from DiMaio, the retired medical examiner in San Antonio. DiMaio first documented the snowstorm phenomenon in 1985 in his book “Gunshot Wounds,” a definitive pathology text.

DiMaio testified that the X-rays did not show a snowstorm at all. And with the body so decimated, he said, no one could tell whether a bullet killed Glover, much less its path through his body.

“What did the entrance wound look like? You don’t know, because you haven’t seen it. What did the exit look like? You don’t know. Did it actually exit, or was it just under the skin and when the body burned it just fell into all the debris? You don’t know.”

U.S. District Judge Lance Africk, presiding over the pre-trial hearing, asked whether this was a routine disagreement among professionals, or something more fundamental.

Executions take place at the Georgia Diagnostic Prison in Jackson. John Spink, jspink@ajc.com

Kelly Gissendaner is scheduled to be executed Tuesday.

Georgia plans to execute Kelly Gissendaner Tuesday, but many details of the lethal injection are top secret. Under a 2013 state law, Georgia corrections officials don’t have to publicly identify the manufacturer of the execution drug, the compounding pharmacist who mixes the solution, or much of anything else.

Georgia’s lethal injections weren’t always so secretive. In 2007, the state’s chief medical examiner testified in open court about all the drugs then used for executions, the dosages, and the effects on the condemned prisoner.

Dr. Kris Sperry was an expert witness for the state of Florida when a death row inmate challenged that state’s execution protocols after the botched lethal injection of another prisoner.

When Florida executed Angel Diaz in December 2006, the procedure took a remarkable 34 minutes. The intravenous line that was supposed to feed the drugs into Diaz’s bloodstream apparently was not properly inserted. The drugs leaked into the muscles of his arm and took far longer than usual to put him to death.

The following day, anticipating a challenge from the next inmate scheduled for execution, Florida’s attorney general hired Sperry – who frequently moonlights as an expert witness in forensic pathology – to help defend the state’s procedures.

Angel Diaz

In a hearing in Ocala, Florida, in July 2007, Sperry testified that Florida and Georgia used the same combination of drugs for lethal injection. The only difference, he said, was that Florida used heavier doses that would kill an inmate faster.

The recipe for the lethal “cocktail,” according to a transcript of Sperry’s testimony:

Thiopental sodium, also known as pentobarbital. Florida administered 5 grams, while Georgia used 2, Sperry said. Any dosage of more than 400 milligrams would leave a person unconscious and in “respiratory depression,” he said. “The brain would forget to breathe.”

Pancuronium bromide. Florida’s cocktail contained 100 mg, compared to Georgia’s 50. Either dosage, Sperry said, would cause “virtually instantaneous” paralysis and prevent a person from breathing. In combination with the first drug, he said, “the person would be unable to perceive any kind of paralysis because they would have been rendered unconscious.”

Potassium chloride. This drug – at Florida’s dosage of 240 milliequivalents or Georgia’s of 120 – would cause “instantaneous cessation or stoppage of the heart,” Sperry said.

Ian Deco Lightbourne

The entire cocktail, Sperry said, would result in “a humane and painless death.”

The judge upheld Florida’s execution plan. But the inmate, Ian Deco Lightbourne, who now calls himself Ish’od Gi’hon, sentenced to death for a 1981 murder, remains on death row, his appeals continuing.

Gissendaner, convicted of conspiring to murder her husband in 1997, is still appealing, too, of course, but with far less detail about the execution process than Lightbourne had.

Beginning next month, the State Board of Pardons and Paroles will notify crime victims and prosecutors when a sex offender or other violent felon applies for a pardon, including those restoring the right to possess firearms. For decades, the agency has kept the existence of such applications confidential, and prosecutors and victims could not learn about pardons until after the fact. From now on, they’ll be offered a chance to weigh in before the board acts.

The parole board also decided Tuesday to impose new restrictions on pardon applications from registered sex offenders. The board historically has considered pardon requests only if sex offenders have been out of prison or off probation for at least five years. Tuesday’s vote extended the waiting period to 10 years.

These changes take effect in 30 days, barring a legal challenge. The General Assembly is likely to consider more changes when it convenes next month.

The board acted after months of critical examinations, including a series of investigative articles in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Geddy Kramer favored video games set in dystopian worlds. He listened to music with angry lyrics. He dabbled with drugs. He desperately wanted to have sex. He watched porn on his iPhone. He saw a therapist for depression. He grieved, mostly in silence, over his parents’ divorce.

He was an American teenager in the 21st century.

One day in September 2012, Kramer sat in school, quietly mocking his classmates. And plotting to kill them.

“These … idiots have no idea what I’m writing,” Kramer typed into a journal on his phone. “I wish I could kill all of them, but there’s just not enough time and so much to do. And, like Dylan Klebold, I think I’ll have some followers. Maybe a few at least. All I have to say to them is kill those that stand in your way.”

Kramer killed no one in high school. His grasp for notoriety, his attempt to emulate Klebold and Eric Harris, the Columbine High School shooters, didn’t happen until almost a year after he graduated. On April 29, armed with a shotgun and homemade explosives, Kramer shot and wounded six people at the suburban FedEx warehouse where he worked. He was a would-be spree killer who took only one life. His own.

Many rituals follow mass shootings in the United States, prominent among them a search for meaning — for the hidden clues that would somehow make sense of why the shooter snapped; for the missed signals that, if detected in time, might have forestalled the tragedy.

But a close examination of Geddy Kramer’s final months finds no obvious cause for his rampage. It suggests no dramatic descent into madness. And, perhaps most important, it reveals nothing that Kramer did that necessarily would have alerted anyone to the looming assault.

Kramer’s case shows the difficulty of predicting and preventing acts of mass violence, and of understanding what drives its perpetrators. Common traits, including some form of mental illness, tend to define spree killers, experts say, but those same traits also stand out among many more people who never commit a violent act.

“If you predict every isolated, troubled young man is going to perpetrate a mass shooting, you would be wrong thousands of times,” said Jeffrey Swanson, a professor of psychiatry at Duke University’s School of Medicine who studies the nexus between violence and mental illness.

This examination is based in part on 600 pages of police reports, along with 33 compact discs of witness statements, crime scene photographs, and data from Kramer’s phone: text messages, his Internet browsing history, and his electronic journal, sarcastically titled “The Thoughts of a Nobody.”

Kramer’s writings, though often juvenile and profane, betray no delusional thinking or paranoid fixations. Rather, they reflect the banality of adolescence, returning again and again to Kramer’s indignity over how others viewed him — as such a loser that he appeared exactly once as a senior in his high school yearbook — versus his exalted self-image. Certainly, Kramer had problems. But the fact that he responded to them with extreme measures may be all that distinguishes him from any other disaffected 19-year-old.

Kramer left behind two mysteries, equally unsolvable and unnerving: why he harbored such rage, and how he concealed it with such ease before he erupted in violence.